The Trail Ends at Hell

by John Benteen

  Kilpatrick fought drought, floods, rustlers and Indians as he trailed four-thousand head of longhorns the thousand miles from Texas to the Kansas railhead. But it was only when he finally hit the raw new town of Gunsight that his troubles really began. Gunsight had started life as a town where cattle could be bought for the best price and the men who’d driven them there would get a fair shake of the whip. But now everything was different. Jordan Tully was the man who called the shots now, and Wayne Trask was the hired gun who saw that his orders were carried out.

  That put Tully at loggerheads with Kilpatrick. And as if that wasn’t enough, Kilpatrick had to keep his eyes peeled for Rio Fanning, the young hothead who had sworn to kill him!

  THE TRAIL ENDS AT HELL

  By John Benteen

  First published by Doubleday & Co in 1972

  Copyright © 1972, 2015 by Benjamin L. Haas

  First Smashwords Edition: July 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Cover image © 2015 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book ~*~Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  Kilpatrick had just circled the enormous herd, was a hundred yards from the chuck wagon fire when he saw the trouble exploding there. In the orange glow, two men were suddenly on their feet, crouching, hands near gun butts, confronting one another across the blaze, and all the other Two Rail riders were diving for cover. Kilpatrick cursed and put spurs to his big roan. He recognized the silhouettes. One was Jess Ford, middle-aged easygoing, a top cowpuncher who’d made the drive up to Kansas a half-dozen times before with Kilpatrick. The other was the kid who’d signed on at Doane’s Crossing — the boy who called himself Rio Fanning and was the only two-gun man in the trail crew. Kilpatrick held his breath, lashed the horse. Seconds more and guns would thunder — and four thousand Texas longhorns would jump to their feet from the bed ground and start to run!

  As the roan stretched itself, Kilpatrick’s big hand went to the sixty-foot rawhide reata lashed to his saddle. Neither man was aware of his approach in the tension of the second: like two angry dogs just before a fight, they were snarling at each other, hurling war-talk back and forth that Kilpatrick could not hear. But he could see the fury in Jess’s usually mild eyes, and the gunfighter’s stance of the boy, Rio, with his back to Kilpatrick, spoke for itself. The trail boss got the rope loose, shook out a loop.

  Then it happened. Jess Ford saw the oncoming rider. His eyes flickered away from Rio for an instant. At that moment, the boy’s right hand flashed down.

  It was a long throw, and more than a man’s life hinged on it. Kilpatrick hadn’t shoved this big herd across a thousand hard and dangerous miles to see it stampeded now, two days away from the drive’s end. The loop sailed out through darkness, settled, and for one despairing second Kilpatrick thought it was falling short. Then it slipped around Rio’s shoulders and Kilpatrick jerked it savagely, just as the boy’s Peacemaker cleared its holster.

  The roan pulled to a skidding halt. Rio was jerked backwards, landed hard, hauled a yard or two, the gun flying from his hand. Then Kilpatrick was off the horse, running down the rope like a man after a calf. As Rio got groggily to his knees, arms pinned, left hand nevertheless instinctively reaching for the other gun, Boyd Kilpatrick was on him like a panther.

  His weight slammed Rio back to earth. His right thumb slipped between the hammer spike of the Colt and the cartridge in its chamber; Kilpatrick paid no attention to the hammer’s gouge. His left hand, big as a ham, hard as a chunk of post oak, clubbed Rio and clubbed him hard — and suddenly the slender form beneath the trail boss went limp and slack.

  Only then, fishing Rio’s Colt from leather, his thumb dribbling blood, did Boyd Kilpatrick get to his feet. A big man in his early thirties, wide in the shoulders, deep in the chest, lean in waist and hips, he stood there over the unconscious kid. His gray eyes swirled with fury, the lips of a wide mouth beneath an eagle’s beak of a nose pulled back in a snarl. Then he turned to confront Jess Ford.

  “All right, dammit!” he snapped. “What the hell’s this all about? Jess, you know my orders! We got four thousand cattle out there and in another two seconds they’d have been runnin’ from hell to breakfast!”

  Boyd Kilpatrick was not a man who angered easily, but the one thing that would rouse him — or any other professional trail boss — to savagery was the useless endangerment of his herd. Men were expendable, but cattle weren’t; always, the herd came first. Now Ford turned pale and sheepish beneath Kilpatrick’s glare.

  “It wasn’t Jess’s fault, boss,” another voice cut in before Ford could answer. Panhandle Smith had once been the best bronc stomper in south Texas; now, busted-up and gimpy, he made his living as camp cook. Still razor-keen and tough as a pine knot, he limped into the firelight. “That kid — ” He gestured toward the unconscious Rio. “You know how he’s been ever since he signed on — itchin’ for a fight, causin’ trouble ever’ time he turned around, lookin’ for a chance — any chance — to use them irons of his. We was talkin’ about what we was gonna do when we hit Gunsight an’ — ”

  “No,” Ford said, letting out a long breath. “No, I ought not to have let him riled me. We was talkin’ about women and he started pickin’ at me about bein’ too old to handle a woman and — I asked him to lay off, but he wouldn’t. All the same, I should have took it instead of givin’ him the chance to cause gunplay and scare the herd.”

  “You sure as hell should,” Kilpatrick said tightly. He turned away, stared down at the unconscious boy again. Rio Fanning couldn’t have been much over nineteen; tall and lanky, he’d be a big man someday when he filled out, but he was a long way yet from having his full growth. One of the Two Rail hands had got stomped out of commission by a horse and Fanning, hanging around Doane’s store at the Red River crossing, had signed on to replace him. Kilpatrick had worried from the beginning about the two Colts strapped around the kid’s skinny waist and tied down gunfighter style — men who wore guns like that were bad medicine, whether they could use them or not. But he’d needed the extra rider, and, for that matter, the guns as well. When they turned west, beyond the Red, there would be Comanches to worry about. If the kid could use all that hardware, he’d be worth his pay.

  As it turned out, he could use it and use it miraculously. In his hard-bitten years that included service with Hood’s Cavalry in the War, Kilpatrick had seen a lot of gunmen, but he had never seen a man before who had the genius Rio Fanning possessed with a pair of Colts. They’d had a tussle with the Indians, and Rio’s guns had helped tip the balance against a big war party of braves that had jumped the Reservation on which McKenzie’s Cavalry had supposedly settled them years before.

  But the boy’s subsequent behavior had used up all the credit that had earned him with Boyd Kilpatrick. He had something Kilpatrick had seen too often — the gunfighter’s itch. Cocky as a young rooster, he was aching for a chance to prove himself again, and he’d tried at one time or another to pick a fight with every man in the outfit, save Kilpatrick himself. But most of these men had been with Boyd for years; they knew his rules about gunplay in camp, and they’d given Rio a wide berth and taken his guff without fighting back w
hen they couldn’t. Kilpatrick had been on the verge of firing the boy a half-dozen times and had not quite been able to bring himself to do so. Despite all the headaches Fanning had caused him, the trail boss had found himself liking the youth for some reason too obscure to explain even to himself. Now, though, be saw he’d made a mistake.

  He turned to Panhandle. “Collect all his weapons, including his saddle gun. Stash ’em in the hoodlum wagon and keep a guard over ’em so he don’t get to ’em. Throw some water on him and tell him that when he comes to, I wanta see him.” Then Kilpatrick went to the fire, poured a cup of strong, black, scalding Arbuckle and scooped up a handful of sourdough biscuits. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and he went beyond the firelight and sat down, while Panhandle shook loose his rope and coiled it.

  ~*~

  The food tasted good. While he ate, Kilpatrick let his thoughts run ahead. Two days, and then it would be over — his sixth drive as professional trail boss. Two days — and then he’d know whether or not he’d made the right decision in turning the herd toward Gunsight.

  They had argued about it down in Texas — he and the three cattlemen who’d put together this big drive of longhorns road-branded Two Rail. “Dammit, what you want to go to that place for?” old John Ray Simms had demanded. With nearly twenty-five hundred cattle in the drive, his word had carried the most weight.

  Calmly, Boyd had outlined his reasons. “Listen. Come spring, the Chisholm and the Western trails are gonna be jammed nose to rump with longhorns. Every herd out of Texas will be bound for either Abilene or Dodge and by June there won’t be enough grass left to feed a prairie dog. On top of that, the settlers are comin’ in around there, fencin’ up the country, raisin’ hell about the herds stompin’ their crops, startin’ quarantines against Texas fever. All right, Gunsight’s a new town, a long ways west, sure. Last year, it didn’t exist at all; this year, it’s the new end-of-track. It wants to grow up to be the kind of shipping point Dodge and Abilene are. I aim to have the first herd there.

  “Look at it this way,” he went on. “We’ll have to drive a few hundred extra miles, yeah. But because nobody’s ever been over that trail before, there’ll be good grass all the way and no other herds to compete with for it. Those mossyhorns of yours will weigh out at ten, fifteen pounds more on the hoof apiece than if they had to scrounge their way into Abilene or Dodge. On top of which, the buyers there will be hungry for business, biddin’ against one another for the first herd, oughta drive the price sky-high. I figure the drive to Gunsight ought to be worth a good twenty thousand dollars extra on this herd — and since I get a rake-off of five per cent, that’s reason enough for me to head farther west.”

  Money talked; the prospect of an extra twenty thousand fairly shouted. Besides, nobody else in Texas could match Boyd Kilpatrick’s reputation as a professional trail boss. When he undertook to deliver a herd, he got it there, never minus more than a handful of beeves lost at river crossings or slaughtered to feed the crew. And when he negotiated a price, he got top dollar. The Val Verde syndicate knew how tough he was; they knew that, no matter what the cost in men, the cattle would get through. And, in the end, they had yielded.

  “All right,” John Ray had grunted finally. “Take the critters to Gunsight! But we’ll expect the same price we’d have gotten in Dodge or Abilene!” Well, Kilpatrick thought now, finishing the last biscuit, they were almost there, and every cow-critter in the herd was greasy fat on lush grass untouched by any other drive. That part of it had worked out as he’d planned, anyhow. He tipped back a battered sombrero over thick, black hair tinged slightly with gray at the temples. Then his hand went to the pocket of his batwing chaps, scarred by brush and horn. There was the letter from Isaac Gault, mayor of Gunsight — the one on which he’d based his decision. If Gault had misled him, if there weren’t plenty of buyers in town, if cattle cars weren’t easily available, if the whole layout wasn’t set up to encourage an influx of beef and hell-raising Texas cowhands, then he was in trouble. If prices weren’t good in Gunsight and he had to turn east, drive to Dodge, he’d get there late, after the cream had been skimmed off the market by other herds. He’d have made a mistake — and Boyd Kilpatrick wasn’t a man to tolerate mistakes, either in himself or the men he’d hired.

  He got to his feet. Then he tensed. All right, they’d sloshed Rio Fanning down with water; the kid was awake. Now, gunless, he strode toward Kilpatrick; and even in the faint light from the distant fire, Boyd could see the fury in the young man’s black eyes.

  Letting his cup drop, he waited while Rio came up.

  “Kilpatrick!” The kid’s voice crackled with anger. “Kilpatrick, I want my guns!”

  Boyd let out a long breath.

  “No,” he said.

  Rio was nearly as tall as the trail boss, but his youthful body lacked fifty pounds of Boyd’s two hundred of hard-muscled weight. Limned against the firelight, Boyd could see how it trembled with rage.

  “Listen, Kilpatrick. I’m quittin’ this outfit! Anybody that ain’t got the guts to meet me face to face, has to rope me from behind like a damn leppy calf — !”

  Boyd said, almost wearily: “Rio. You know my rules about gunplay. Four thousand cattle out there and I nursed those pounds on to every one of ’em all the way north. You pulled that trigger, they’d have stampeded from here to yonder. Not only that, they’d have run off a good ten, twenty pounds apiece when they did. You’re damned lucky I roped you around the shoulders and not around the neck. I shoulda broke your goddamned neck for you.”

  “You’ll be sorry you didn’t!”

  “I ain’t a bit sorry. I got to sell those cows day after tomorrow. They wouldn’t have had time to graze the weight back on a stampede woulda run off of ’em. All right, you want your time, you can have it. I ought to have given it to you back in the Nations.”

  Rio was a handsome boy, with lips like a girl’s. He was, Kilpatrick had thought, almost too pretty. Now those lips curled back to show white teeth. “You didn’t do it then because you needed me to kill Comanches for you. You waited until you didn’t have no more use for me — ”

  Kilpatrick was silent for a moment. Nevertheless, he could not help feeling that curious liking that had held his hand before on the occasions when he knew he should have paid off the kid and sent him on his way. Suddenly the anger went out of him. “Listen, Fanning,” he said in a milder voice. “We’re damned near at Gunsight. I don’t want to have to fire you now. Simmer down, stick with the drive until we hit town. Then I’ll pay you off and give you back your guns. Otherwise, I’ll have to turn you loose and ... well, it’ll be a black mark against you down in Texas. They ain’t got much use for a man down there that can’t stick it out all the way up the trail.”

  Rio Fanning laughed softly. “I don’t care what they think about me back in Texas. The hell with Texas and everybody in it! I only signed on with you to get enough money to come north! I’m through with Texas!”

  Kilpatrick rubbed his palms on his chaps. Something in Fanning’s outburst had stirred him. “I don’t quite see what you’re driving at.”

  The boy’s eyes gleamed in the darkness. “Listen, Boyd,” he said, his voice low and hoarse. “You know what trash is? Well, that’s my family! Trash — the old man a drunk and the old lady stretched out in a road ranch for anybody with the cash ... You think anybody with any balls on him can stand that kind of thing? Maybe Texas is great to you, maybe it means something to Boyd Kilpatrick, but it don’t mean nothing to me but a bunch of drunken cowhands slamming around the house when I was a little kid, hitting me when I was in the way.” His voice vibrated with intensity. “I knowed a long time ago I was gonna git outa there. And there ain’t no way to get outa something like that when you got no money, you got no connections, except a gun! All right, there ain’t nobody in the West any greater with a handgun than me! I don’t care who it is, Earp, Hickok, the Thompsons, Clay Allison, King Fisher — I trained myself with a gun. It was the only way out I
had. And now we’re hittin’ a new town — Gunsight! It’ll be wide open, a good gunman can make a name for hisself in a place like that!” He broke off for a moment. “That’s the only reason I signed up with your Two Rail drive — to get to Gunsight! Okay, we’re almost there! Now I want my money and I want my guns!”

  Kilpatrick hesitated. This was the first look he’d had at what went on behind the tough exterior of Rio Fanning. Then he said, “Look here, kid. I’ll grant you’re good with your hoglegs. I’ve hit some rough places, and I’ve never seen nobody better. But you’ve got to look ahead. You’re what — nineteen? Time you’re my age, the whole world will have changed. The nesters are comin’ in, this end of the country will settle up. Fifteen years from now, maybe ten, there won’t be no premium on gunhands. But there’ll always be a place for a man that knows cows.”

  “Cows!” Rio’s voice was rank with contempt.

  “That’s right,” Kilpatrick said. “Cows. This country runs on beef. Our job’s to raise it, trail it, ship it. People that know how to do that’ll get rich, sooner or later. You’ve got the makings of a cowman; I’ve watched you and I know. With a little seasoning, you could start your own spread, build it up, and someday you could be a big man. Me, I’m doin’ the same with what I make off of trail drivin’. One of these days, I figure on havin’ an empire. I mean it, a real empire. And there’s always room for a good man on a place like I aim to build. I could use you.”

  “Me?” Fanning’s voice was incredulous. “What for? To gather cow chips to build your fires? Cows stink!” He slapped the empty holster on his right thigh. “I can’t wait. I’m tired of bein’ nobody; I gotta be somebody, and I gotta be somebody soon! And you do that with a gun. You can drive beef critters until you die, and when it’s all over, nobody will have ever heard of Boyd Kilpatrick! But all I got to do is brace one good gunhand and burn him down — and then everybody’ll know who I am!” He broke off. “I want my guns, Boyd. I want my guns and I want my time. I’ll ride on into Gunsight. It’s a place that oughta be wide open, a place where I can build my rep. You lemme have my irons, gimme my pay, and I’ll quit your goddamn herd and go into business for myself.”